


Canticle

by DarlaBlack



Series: Ficlets & Prompt Responses [6]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s07e22 Requiem (X-Files), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 15:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16956873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: What if the extended/uncut version of Requiem (bed scene) led to an AU were Mulder didn’t go back to Oregon?





	Canticle

“There’s so much more you need to do with your life. There’s so much more than this.”

“There are costs for everything, Mulder” she says. “And sacrifices.”

“Yeah, but what is left to sacrifice for?” He brushes her hair away from her face. “There has to be an end, Scully.”

He kisses her cheek, and she grips his hand in hers, runs her lips along it, feeling so drained. Feeling tired of having to remind him.

“For you,” she says. “For you it’s worth the sacrifice. I won’t quit without you.” She presses her back against his chest and her lips to his knuckles.

That night she sleeps in his bed, in his t-shirt, nose buried in his bare chest so her breath warms his skin. He watches her back rise and fall. He tucks his fingers under the hem of her underwear, just touching the top of her bottom. She’s his, he thinks, but he would let her go to keep her safe. He would do anything to keep her safe.

That night she sleeps in his bed and she dreams—dreams of terrible things. She sees him strapped into a device of horrors, where drills and saws and needles press into his skin, cut open his chest, violate every part of him. She sees him dead on the cold ground. She sees his coffin in the snow, his empty apartment. She wakes sobbing in his arms, saying “No, Mulder, no!” And when he tries to tell her everything is okay, she rushes to his tiny bathroom to vomit.

He pounds on the door. He calls her Dana until she unlocks it and looks at him with haunted eyes, holding a cold washcloth to her face.

“We’re taking you to the doctor,” he says.

“You can’t go near the ship,” she says. “It’s you it wants.” Then she collapses against him.

He carries her to the bed where he kisses her forehead, her shoulder, her hip and says he’s sorry, that he loves her. He holds her like a cocoon, arms and legs around her, until she feels strong enough to dress.

“We’re going home,” he announces.

In the airport he makes her drink gatorade, buys her a snack-sized bag of crackers.

“I saw you,” she tells him. “I saw you dead from what they would do.”

He rubs her back and opens the crackers for her. Watches to make sure she eats one. “Okay,” he says. “I won’t go back out there.”

With the time difference, they arrive late and go to his apartment because it’s closer. In his bedroom he hands her a t-shirt and says, “I want you to get some rest.”

“I’m fine,” she assures him, laying her hand on his forearm.

He rubs his temple, then his eyes. He thinks of her nightmare, of the words that splashed icewater down his spine:  _I saw you dead_.“Please,” he says.

She remembers, too. She flashes on a frozen grave, and remembers something else—a thought like a fading dream of her hand on her belly and an apology to an impossible child. It’s like lightening in her veins and she gasps.

“What?” He asks.

“Oh, Mulder,” she says. She grabs his hand and pulls it to her belly, still flat and muscled. “Oh, Mulder.”

His brow furrows until he understands, and then he cries into her neck and picks her up by the waist. Three tests confirm what she already knew.

When Skinner and Krycek and Marita appear in their office, he tells them  _no_. He tells them, “We quit.”


End file.
